More jobs go green



By Fran Metcalf    

Blue and white-collar workers need to make room for another colour on the jobs spectrum: green-collar workers.

Emerging from the need to cut carbon emissions and find more environmentally sustainable ways of doing business, green jobs are set to flood the labour market in coming years.

Some – according to University of Sydney’s Workplace Research Centre senior analyst Dr Mike Rafferty – are already sprouting and they’re across a diverse range of sectors from farming to technology, tourism and trades.

“An example is an initiative called ‘green plumbing’ which involves a post-trade course that (enables) plumbers (to become) consultants to builders and householders on how to do things more efficiently and use less energy,” Rafferty says.

“The great prospect is creating professionals in their trade.

“The training program for this has been exported to New Zealand and California.”

Accounting is also seeing green shoots, with clients increasingly seeking carbon and water footprint analyses before doing business.

“Buyers want to know how much pesticide, carbon and water is used to produce things before they purchase. So, in this way, accountants are becoming consultants and change agents towards reducing carbon,” Rafferty says.

“And some of the accounting courses at universities across the country are now starting to include these aspects.”

Farmers, already custodians of the land, are also getting greener, with Queensland a world leader on the sustainable production of cotton.

Queensland’s Department of Employment, Economic Development and Innovation principal development officer, Mark Hickman, explains how a new industry award and qualification based on green skills have been created for cotton farmers.

“The cotton industry in the 1990s developed a best management practice program which was about certifying farms that implemented research and development,” he says. “We discovered that a lot of the skills farmers were implementing were actually green skills, so we developed a new industry award to recognise farmers who had (these) green skills, independent of their farms being certified BMP.

“We worked with the vocational education system and developed a new Diploma of Agriculture based on life-long learning and practical implementation of green skills.”

Hickman says Australia’s cotton farmers – largely from Queensland and NSW – already had high green skill levels but the industry’s focus on technology meant that it was continually seeking to improve and upgrade its capacity.

“What drives these farmers is making sure their business is here for the next 100 years,” he says.

“They want to implement the latest technology and processes to make sure they get the most out of their farms without damaging their land.”

Hickman’s work in the cotton industry featured in a research paper which Rafferty presented to the International Labor Organisation conference in Geneva in May.

The green skills of 19 developed and under-developed nations were compared at the conference and Rafferty led the research in Australia, analysing sectors and jobs.

He found that Australia lags behind European countries on environmental initiatives, caused largely by government backflips on policies and its inability to deliver on promises.

“The scrapping of the emissions trading scheme after Copenhagen and the home insulation saga have been really damaging in terms of growing green jobs in new sectors like renewable energy,” Rafferty says.

“The green jobs bubble promised by emerging industries burst and we don’t believe there will be a lot of new jobs in Australia in recycling and other areas of renewable energy unless policy changes.”

Rafferty says that carbon-intensive industries – where job losses and retraining in sustainable practices had been expected – yielded some surprising findings. “Coal mining, for instance, has been at the forefront of greening jobs and work processes, driven largely by the very environmentally active Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union,” he says.

“Australia is one of the most carbon-intensive countries in the world – only rivalled by the United States – and we have a big challenge ahead in terms of our (per capita) carbon use. We all talk about the need to green the economy but that will change the way work is done and the skills needed in the workforce.”

Some of the research initiatives and findings will be discussed at a climate change conference to be staged in Brisbane next month, Rafferty says.

“The Climate Change @ Work Conference will provide an insight into the latest green business solutions, and carbon-emission mitigation practices in the workplace, as well as providing an update on green policy, green jobs and green workforce development in Australia.”

Climate Change @ Work conference, August 4, Ship Inn, South Bank. More info at www.wrc.org.au

Article from The Courier Mail, July, 2010.